Two Women Against Napoleon
KOHN, HANS
Two Women Against Napoleon The Passionate Exiles. By Maurice Levaillant. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. 350 pp. $4.75. Reviewed by Hans Kohn Professor of History, City College of New York Maurice...
...I go down to my knees to embrace you with all my heart...
...Among her friends there was the one woman, Mme...
...de Stael was born in 1766, the daughter of Jacques Necker, a Protestant from Geneva who as finance minister tried to save the French monarchy from collapse...
...She was passionately loved by many men whom she encouraged but to whom she never yielded...
...Exiled from France, she created a citadel of liberty at Coppet on Swiss soil...
...But her romantic feeling in poetry made a lasting impression on French sensibility...
...de Stael and Chateaubriand, the two great minds by whom she was loved...
...de Stael, was the most admired society-beauty during the Consulate and the Empire...
...de Stael's son and her most famous lover, Benjamin Constant, who had broken loose from the yoke of Mme...
...Mme...
...de Recamier will nevertheless not be forgotten as long as people will continue to read Mme...
...de Stael's death in 1817...
...Adieu, my young sister," she wrote to "the other half" of her soul, "I clasp you to my heart, for I love you with a love surpassing friendship...
...Mme...
...de Stael, whom he angrily called the "man-woman...
...These two women, so different in everything, had formed a close and passionate friendship, une amitie amoureuse, as the original : French title of this book has it...
...The friendship between the two women lasted nineteen years, from 1798 to Mme...
...A few days before Mme...
...They were both complex personalities, proud of their independence and determined to remain upright, even before Napoleon...
...de Stael, was fifteen years dead...
...de Stael spoke of "the alliance of two weak creatures facing up to their oppressor together...
...Among her adorers were Mme...
...de Recamier, who shared her exile...
...Reviewed by Hans Kohn Professor of History, City College of New York Maurice Levaillant is well known as a Chateaubriand scholar, to whom we owe not only the definitive edition of Chateaubriand's memoirs and letters but two books...
...Hence the American title of the book, a dual biography of the two women during the Napoleonic period...
...de Stael was a true liberal, who looked not to Rousseau but to England and its institutions for guidance...
...The story of their friendship is told from many published or unpublished letters and other original documents, which are selected to define the fascination of this feminine friendship with its anxieties and raptures...
...Her political Anglo-philism and liberalism, unfortunately, had little influence in the long run on the French mind...
...who was eleven years younger than Mme...
...Mme...
...In his Chateaubriand studies, Levaillant came upon Mine, cle Recamier, who at the age of 55 became Chateaubriand's mistress and thus for the first time in her life experienced carnal love...
...She was the virgin wife of an elderly banker whom she married at the age of 16...
...She became the most brilliant French woman writer of her time...
...Recamier together for the first time...
...de Stael's death, she invited Chateaubriand and Mme...
...It involved, directly or indirectly, every major figure of the political and literary world of their time...
...de Recamier's heart which she herself was soon to vacate...
...If so, her wish was fulfilled...
...By then, her great friend, Mme...
...de Recamier...
...Though she was not pretty or beautiful she i exercised a fascinating attraction 1 upon men and the list of her lovers, among them some famous men, was very long...
...de Stael in Coppet and which served to enrich and to enlarge the French spirit...
...It was a cosmopolitan circle which surrounded Mme...
...Was it her desire that he should take the place in Mme...
...A woman without any great mind or any great achievements, of a beauty which like all beauty must fade with advancing years, Mme...
...Yet these two so different women, the mind and the beauty, formed one of the most remarkable friendships among women known to history...
...de Stael is the more outspoken of the two...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 22
